by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math
Tom Friedman goes digging for an environmental pony. And Andrew Sullivan too. We've been here before. Look, if the right-of-center green intellectuals think that a carbon tax is the way to go, they need to start convincing right-of-center politicians to say so. Otherwise we'll end up with a cap-and-trade system of emission credits and a brand spanking new federal/international agency to audit them. So if Andrew Sullivan, David Brooks, Tom Friedman et al. want to have a little club where they extol the virtues of a carbon tax, that's fine, but they'll need to do more direct advocacy to get the Governator and John McCain off of their cap-and-trade plans.
Note that this probably means first waging war with the Nihilist wing of Republican party that believes "tax" is a four-letter word, so that the GOP becomes something more than the party of more unsound tax cuts and more unsound wars. Then, they have to win the debate about how best to finance the small-but-not-nonexistent government. It's all a very long project, and I don't have any credibility with that constituency, so get cracking.
